


The cold wind made your cheeks glow

by hellokerry



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s06e03 Triangle, F/M, Mulder is in love and has no chill, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 07:33:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15769479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellokerry/pseuds/hellokerry
Summary: He stood across the room from her day after day, arguing faith and reason until one day he wondered if it even mattered anymore when all he wanted was her.





	The cold wind made your cheeks glow

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from "Berlin" by Bear's Den, which I highly recommend.

Mulder tells Scully he loves her and she rolls her eyes, thinks it’s the meds they have him on. “Oh brother,” she sighs exasperatedly before walking away. She thinks he’s delirious.

“How can you think I’m anything but hopelessly in love with you?” he wants to yell after her, but doesn’t. The slope of her shoulders broadcasts relief even though her demeanor screams patiently annoyed with her partner who once again managed to get himself almost killed. She had looked frightened when he first saw her, lips pursed into a thin line and eyes so wide he felt like he was still surrounded by the ocean, the taste of her lingering on his tongue and the ghost of her frame pressed up against him. Mulder has held Scully too many times to count at this point, but it was always in the throes of danger, or injury, or barely avoided death. Never had he held her with such purposeful self-abandon, with the express intent to kiss her and mean it. 

Sure, he had thought about it before (when he first held her chin after Donnie Pfaster and she had stared up at him, stern and bleary eyed, he had wrapped his arms around her and told her that she was okay, that she was brave, when all he really wanted to tell her was that if she had died he would have died along with her, but he couldn’t tell her that, not now, surrounded by police and suffocated by the commingling of fears nearily realized, but he had felt her heaving breaths against his chest and wanted to scream, I love you, I love you, I’m in love with you). He has spent years of his life digesting the enigma that is Dana Scully, a subject he is terrified he might never have the opportunity to master. He composes lines in his mind on the way she gracefully bends at the hip to inspect a crime scene and then wonders if she even likes poetry, does she even like him? 

Mulder liked Scully from the moment he met her -- she was whip smart with a wry sense of humor that soaked deep into his bones every time he made her chuckle, the weight of her presence pressing against the basement’s four walls. Mulder wanted to make her smile, he wanted her to feel as if someone was on her side, that the opinions she shared with him were sometimes infuriating, but always valuable, and she was so much more than an alluring spy sent by the government to get him fired.

(I’m not part of any agenda, she had told him, I’m here just like you.)

Mulder was so certain about so many uncertainties in his entire life -- the paranormal exists, government agencies are filled with liars -- but Scully threw him in a way he hadn’t been prepared for. He stood across the room from her day after day, arguing faith and reason until one day he wondered if it even mattered anymore when all he wanted was her. It was frightening and liberating all at once in its intensity. He loved her. Could she ever love him?

He had worn her cross for days after Duane Barry kidnapped her -- showered with it, slept with it, ate, worked, breathed with it, remembering the way it used to tease the swell of her breasts, wondering if it ever would again, or if Scully would just be another person who he had loved and then lost. When she miraculously surfaced, alive but half-dead, the cross had dangled between them as he leaned over the hospital bed, desperately wanting to will her back to life. Her mother had seen it; her eyes flashed realization even through shock and grief. I am an honorable man, he had wanted to say, with honorable intentions, but instead he said nothing.

What he did say eventually was this: You saved me. The words paled in comparison to the everything she means to him, but he didn’t know how else to convey it, the way she had melted into the landslide of his life and filled all of the crevices to make him whole again. She thought he didn’t need her and that was insane. Mulder needed Scully the way his lungs needed air, their breath co-mingling on a vast antarctic plain, and the truth meant nothing if she wasn’t there alongside him. He kissed her in 1939, because he did not kiss her then.

He smiles as he watches her stalk out of the hospital room, the memory of her palm still lingering on his cheek. She is strong, his Scully, strong and stubborn and beautiful. He would live a thousand lifetimes with her. He hopes one day she’ll see it.


End file.
